The British food watchdog is asking fast-food restaurants to add calorie-counts to their menus -- and want to adopt a set of "traffic light" labels that indicate dangerously high levels of salt, fat, sugar (or, presumably, eyeball-gnawing maggots, see post below).

Getty Images The experience of a handful of countries such as Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, United States, and recently Hungary, demonstrates that a home-grown, independent fiscal watchdog is best equipped to conduct real-time surveillance of fiscal policy-making.